My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam.
I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Monday, March 23, 2009

Did Crypto-Jews spread the Bahai religion in Iran???

In Iran, state-sponsored hate propaganda and conspiracy theories against the Bahai are never-ending. Now, “crypto-Jews” - also called “Anusim” - are said to have been responsible for the spread of the Babi and Bahai religions in Iran.

Farsnews is not just any Iranian news agency. It is a state-sponsored news agency and mouthpiece of the Iranian military. An example of state-inspired hate speech appeared on 1 March 2009.

State-inspired lies: crypto-Jews are guilty of spreading the Bahai religion

Abdollah Shahbazi, the author of the article that appeared in Farsnews, is not unknown in Iran. He was an active member of the pro-Moscow communist Tudeh party in the days of the Soviet Union. At the end of the 1980s he founded a research institute that openly and closely cooperated with the secret service of the “Islamic Republic of Iran”. And he was one of the prominent figures who supported the election of Ahmadinejad in the ninth presidential elections in 2005. Shahbazi - old communist and new Islamist, anti-Semite and anti-Bahai - seriously claims to have discovered in his researches that “crypto-Jews” have played “an important role in bringing about and spreading Babism and Bahaism in Iran’s recent history”.

Of course the Jews are to blame

Shahbazi is one of the Iranian authors who have been agitating against the Bahai for years. His conspiracy theories consist of half-truths whose ultimate purpose is to defame the Bahai and of course the Jews. He claims that when the Babi religion began in the 19th century, it was not Muslims who converted to the Babi and Bahai religions but crypto-Jews who had merely assumed Muslim names. What is true is that the Babi religion has been stifled in Iran at the insistence of the Shiite clergy and that the Bahai have been persecuted since their religion appeared in Iran. It is also true that a number of Jews became Bahai, but so did many Zoroastrians and Muslims. In various writings, Shahbazi, the “Islamic Republic of Iran” ’s increasingly influential hate speech propagandist, claims that Jewish Zionists had first decided to invent a new faith some 150 years ago. But, he said, they had been unsuccessful. For this reason some of them had converted to Islam so that they could then assume the Babi faith as Muslims. They had failed as Jews, so they wanted to support the Babi and Bahai as Muslims. The logic of Ahmadinejad’s supporter is plain and simply wrong: he believes that a good Muslim cannot become a Babi or a Bahai, so it must have been Jews that became Babi and later Bahai. This corresponds to the fact that many Jews assumed the new faith when the Bahai religion first appeared. Likewise, it is also true that, despite persecution by the Muslim clergy and hate speech, many Zoroastrians and Muslims became Bahai. It is a historical fact that most Babi actually converted from Islam. It is also a historical fact that more than the 20,000 Babi who were murdered in the 19th century under pressure from the clergy and state authorities were all converted Muslims. But this is precisely what the ideologues of today’s terror cannot admit; therefore they feel forced to invent anti-Semitic stories.

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My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam.
I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)